


Paroxysms

by LambentLaments



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Heroes join Kronos' Army, Mirror Universe, Multi, Okay Not Really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 07:35:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3438923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LambentLaments/pseuds/LambentLaments
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What matter is it to the worms that squirm in the mud, under which sky they do so, he asks himself, just before Olympus falls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paroxysms

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how the timeline works here. Humor me and pretend it all works out somehow?

Annabeth’s fatal flaw is hubris.

Sometimes she wonders if fatal flaws are something appointed at birth. Had the Fates known what thin threads would pick at her self restraint? Had the gods known? Then should not they blame themselves for what transpires now?

Luke talks of a Golden Age. Everyone hears the rhetoric, anyone who may listen. She is the only one who understands what he really means. Still, when Luke holds his hand out for her, entreating for her to leave camp, she hesitates. She looks into his face and sees bitterness and betrayal. Hah, she recognizes that look, from the bronze blade of her knife. But that is not what makes her grasp his hand in turn. She can fix the desolation in his eyes. If anyone can, it will be her. And, if in the process she can fix the world as well, build it into something more golden and beautiful and structured, it will be worth it just to see that she can.

They will call this betrayal, she knows. But she knows more than any of her campmates.

 _A blessing, or a curse?_ She’d once asked herself. Her heightened mind led her away from the soft corners of her father’s house, but also away from the less hospitable mouths of monsters. She’d never found the answer. She realizes the question was justified- it was whom she was asking that had been erroneous. _Mother, am I a blessing or a curse?_ She thinks as she decodes the messages sent by Silena Beauregard.15 years ago, as she handed her daughter to an unwilling grad student, Athena announced her as the former. Annabeth has always been fond of proving people wrong..

This is not a betrayal, and they are no traitors, for they had never chosen which side they were on. If the gods had presumed their allegiance, well, that was their fault not hers. Sometimes, even as she smiles at Luke, who is becoming something stronger and more indestructible, (this way, she will never lose him) from over the table, where the map of Manhattan is intercrossed with that of Tartarus, she can hear something scuttling across the concaves of her mind.

Perhaps it is the sound of Arachnae’s descendents, warning their foe.

Hubris, they whisper with their mandibles. She shushes them, as her stepmother would. They are not real. 

* * *

Percy is not stupid.

That’s why only Annabeth is allowed to call him that. She calls him idiotic, childish. He laughs. He fights for his life, he fights for his friends and everyone he loves. It has always been so, and how it is now. In mortal high schools, he fought against bullies, and willingly bore the helm of ‘underdog’ to protect the ones alongside him. That is how it is now.

 _For Homer, warriors from both sides of the Trojan War are heroes._ Annabeth whispers, in one of her odd moods. Whom she is trying to persuade, Percy may never find out. He kisses her, long enough to stop her over thinking. You’re doing the right thing, he tells her. Her gray eyes still hold the tendrils of doubt, but she smiles, and he opts to believe it. He doesn’t understand her doubt, not when she was the one to assure him that this is the right cause, not when she was the one to burst into his cabin, and asked him to help her.

She says he is childish, and perhaps she is right. He dunks his cookies in his milk, and sticks his tongue out to a Scythian Dracanae when she complains they’ve run out of blue food coloring on the Princess Andromeda. Yes, that’s exactly what I meant, Annabeth rolls her eyes. What do you mean, then? He asks a bit annoyed. How do you know the monster in front of you really is a monster? She asks. Well, the fact that it’s trying to kill me is a pretty good tell. Plus, I have you to tell me which one to kill. He grins at her. The look he gets from her is a bit exasperated, somewhat fond, and utterly jealous. He doesn’t understand what he’s done to deserve it. It’s what he’s always done.

He cut down Mrs. Dodds because Chrion threw him a magical pen. He broke the Minotaur’s horns because Grover told him to. And now he kills because Annabeth tells him that they’re his enemy, and because he can see blood thirst in the eyes of those charging at him.

The pretty bags of golden dust, they are the bad guys, because he is the good guy. It’s so simple, he doesn’t see why Annabeth seems so confused sometimes. Maybe it’s because their friends aren’t so easy on the eye, he considers as he spurts water from the pool he’s lounging in to hit one of the telekhines doing their metalwork. It’s a recurring joke between him and the creatures, and the dolphin-like animal gives a high pitched grumble. It’ll probably make something mechanical to prank him later, and he finds himself looking forward to it. But Sally has always told him not to judge people by their appearance, and Percy, for all he pretends otherwise, he listens to the things that matter.

His fatal flaw is personal loyalty. He still doubts the truth of that. He doesn’t see how getting Annabeth’s back is such a bad thing.

The Fates spoke to him as a boy of twelve. They did not tell him that one day, he will watch himself swing a sword, and not remember to forget that the enemy has a face, a laugh, a heart to love with. One day, he will be rescued by an elapsed memory, one in which he killed a Titan and birthed a blank page, and he smirked as he named him Bob.

Can he be saved by a monster? Can he kill an innocent? Or is the line dividing the two beings as arbitrary and meaningless as a stroke drawn in a beach? One day doubt, cold and squeezing, will reach out for him to take its due.

This day is not it, and he lounges in the pool and eats cookies, water, as always, serving as his personal Neverland. When he laughs, he laughs a child’s laughter.

* * *

Thalia wears an anarchist badge.

Only she knows of its irony. Her blood sings for power and glory. She dreams of golden thrones and servient plebeians on their knees.

She does not know where her aspirations stem from. She suspects, that it comes from the way her small fists bounced harmlessly against her mother’s legs as she came back empty handed, her infant of a brother bartered away. Perhaps it came from having to face away from her own elements, the dreaded vertigo, the mindless phobia, stripping her of her birthright. Later she wonders it comes from forced years of inertia, monotony save from the winds shaking her branches. Whatever it is, she craves control, if only to compensate for having had none in her life. She recognizes it as a hateful thing, a legacy from her father she never asked for. So she spikes her hair, rips her jeans, and contemplates tongue piercings as she listens to the Sex Pistols.

The first time she is offered a place in Artemis’ hunt, she thinks of Luke. She thinks of the first time she reached orgasm, her underwear lost among the sheets, one finger pressing sideways at her sensitive nub, another sliding into her entrance. The buildup in her stomach, blood roaring in her ears in a way that was completely alien, and then… release. But more importantly, the want that came paradoxically after.

The offer is retreated after she declines, but it is done with a knowing look and a pitying smile that makes her boil. She will not be controlled. She prefers chaos, but if that is not an option, she has no choice but to be the one to control.

Annabeth tells her she’ll be joining _the resistance_. She says it the French way, and Thalia thinks of underground operations against an oppressive regime, and smiles dangerously at how befitting it is. And Luke? She asks. She likes the response.

The second time she declines, she grips her badge. There is more surprise than the last time, and Thalia quells herself as a black storm brews in her. How could they have assumed her servitude so readily? They, who’ve deemed her fatal flaw to be ‘ _Ambition_ ’? She says what they want to hear. If she is not the prophecy child, it would be Percy or Nico instead, and are you really sure you will be able to find them before Percy’s birthday? It is another measure of their presumption to her loyalty that no one even voices her true plans.

She wears her badge, white, with a single crude A stamped victoriously across it, when she leads a legion into the Empire State building. She is the Queen of Anarchy, the Herder of Resistance, and she laughs in irony as she demolishes the throne room and those that guard it.

She has power, she has Luke. Once her dirty secrets, she now has them all. As dust falls from the ceiling, she thinks of how her so called family that abandoned will fall. Even in the resulting gloom, her badge shines bright.

A thought unbidden irks her as she makes her way to Luke. A dryad’s broken form catches her eye from under the rubble, and she sees her mother, intoxicated, sprawled boneless, loose tongued and screaming of her former glories. She thinks of her mother, in her lack of public attention, latching onto Zeus.

What if, this is just a paroxysm to have value by proxy? What if, frightening as that thought is, all this is no more than a tantrum?

She ignores that thought. She is Queen of Anarchy, Herder of the Resistance, and there is not enough space left in her soul for anything else. 

* * *

Clarisse likes red.

She looks down from her chariot, runs her hand through her short, ragged hair. When she was younger, she would imagine it red. She would have dyed it, had she really cared about how it looked to others. As it was, the fantasy was for her only, and she didn’t need to dye it at all.

She spurs the chariot to an oncoming army of centaurs. An arrow grazes her cheek, and she retaliates by electrocuting five of the creatures. She blows away a cloud of golden dust and wipes the blood away with the back of her hand.

Red on her ledger. That is what people say, red on a ledger.

Clarisse has killed more than she can count, but her ledger gleams with gold, enough to drown away the red.

They’re almost at the end of the Williamsburg Bridge, and the remaining forces, those that have managed not to scatter, fall with each turning of her chariot’s wheel. A Cyclops, from Poseidon’s palace, roars at her. It isn’t one of them, not one of Tyson’s army. For Silena!, she screams. She lets out an angry groan as she runs him over, and hacks at him with a sword even as his flesh rips and explodes.

Silena, they called her a traitor. With each arc of her sword she proves them wrong. A mere mocking line of victory is what stands between a coup de’tat and a revolution. The same line stands between a traitor and a saint. She will make Silena a saint, she vows. She will be their Joan of Arc, a model of self-sacrifice. She will slay all who says otherwise. She doubts anyone would.

Bekendorf’s ‘successful’ suicide mission led to a guilt stricken confession, and later, Silena’s…

She does not think of it, of Silena hanging from a beam. She will think of Silena as a martyr, aware of the follies of an old regime, when others were complacent and self indulged. She is a martyr, she tells herself.Her death was a catalyst for Aphrodite, and Hephaestus cabin. Her own cabin was almost as easy to persuade. Ares cabin had never garnered much respect. But if they wanted a blood thirsty animal, they would get one. The rest of the cabins followed, to each their own steps.

Vines come at her, sprawling like snakes, and intertwine at the wheels. She screeches to a stop, and hacks away. An arrow from her side hits a satyr, and the vines grow no more. She nods to Michael Yew, whose bow springs to hit another mark even as she does so.

There are demigods along the foray, at the very end of the bridge, those who did not see the cause, and chose to live as anachronisms, tools for a bloodline that does not care. She pities them, for she’s seen Chris, tipped to insanity over something bigger than his own happiness, and hosts herself a myriad of scars gained from meaningless battles. She charges.

She sees the end of a spear protruding from her torso. She sees red on bronze, an abstract watercolor. As black haze descends upon her, she imagines herself sheathed in a red glow of invincibility, and Michael Yew screaming as the bridge falls, demolished under murky waters. The darkness fully settles, and dispels this fancy and brings instead a moment of unexpected clarity. The sky is gray, crackles with lightening as Zeus battles Typhon. She knows who will win. It was a close match last time, when the Olympians had strong believers. Their children, of course, were always their biggest battery. It is not so now.

Her eyes are still open, but she cannot see anymore, save for inky blackness. It is not the first time she has ever wished to be part of a different pantheon, but it will be the last. She wishes for one where its afterlife is kindest to those felled in battle. If she strains, underneath the storm, she can hear the valkyries sing for her soul. She can hear raucous laughter from Vahalla, where warriors drink and fight and fuck.

She dreams of a futile wish, and then knows no more.

 

* * *

Will watches.

He heals the fallen. More than once a hymn to Apollo starts on his lips, and is cut off as he remembers. The nectar and ambrosia still works, however, and he applies salve, wraps bandages and resets bones, working dizzyingly fast, only if so not to watch his friends fight to their death.

He still cannot help it. He is more useful as a medic, he knows, but can anyone blame him for feeling useless? He shakes off this thought as another demigod stumbles in. He feeds her ambrosia and inspects her swollen ankle. When he tends to his patients, he manages not to think of things above him. Which side to choose, he does not know. All that matters to him in essence is that a life in front of him does not pass on his watch.

That’s what he told Michael, when he asked for his opinion. Newly cabin counselor, still struggling at the extra responsibility, he consulted Will more often than not. When camp politics boiled to the brink of an internal war, Apollo Cabin had to choose a side. I don’t want to see kids dying anymore, he’d said. He still did not know which side he was supporting. But he knew what Michael was thinking of. That is, an unmarked golden shroud, burning…

The city is burning now. Out of the large windows of the building where the medic team has assembled, they have a close up view of the empire state building and the battles around it.

The Hermes girl discusses battles with Kayla. His sister has not yet learned to zone out the war from the healing, is not yet familiar with the sinking gut feeling of sending out a patched up kid to see a corpse return. She still believes they are helping, not merely fixing broken toy soldiers so that they can go kill and get killed.

Oceanus lost. Poseidon reins. The girl says tiredly. What happens now, Kayla asks. They all fight Typhon.

He wonders if he will be here to see Apollo fall.

No, he does not think of things above him. Even so he cannot help himself looking out the window. He sees a small figure leading Luke to Olympus, among giants and drakons, black tendrils emanating from him, a black hole of light and enemies. He thinks of a small, excited face from years ago. He’d talked to him, once, of inconsequential things, of adventures. He’d thought he had nice eyes, and even nicer lashes. A million year old memory, he feels so tired. He wonders if he would ever be able to tell him.

The boy drills on, invincible, and truly majestic in his power. And it’s tragic, he realizes. There is nothing as heartrending as a child forced to be anything else. Then where does that leave him, a spectator, a bystander in history?

A candle burning out in a vigil for children.

* * *

Nico feels nothing.

He feels nothing when Thalia collapses, her eyes rolling back even before he pushes her away from the falling statue of Hera, and they know Typhon has brought Zeus down with him.

He feels nothing as he checks for her pulse, a shivering, weak thing that hides beneath her pallid flesh, and she mutters a singularly unexpected word.

There is a sliver of amusement that starts from him as he runs to catch up to Luke and the others, but it is a dry thing. It has been years since he’s come to associate humor with bitterness, and when he snorts, it is a sound unfitting for someone his size. Paroxysm, Thalia could not have said it better. What matter is it to the worms that squirm in the mud, under which sky they do so. Humans, we convulse and scream to feel alive, to gain a grain of sense of worth, but a single look into the depths of the night sky is enough to dispel the fantasy.

Life is short, but death is eternal.

He learned this at the flat plains of his father’s land, where eternity is as real as any other abstractions. Greys and blacks, merging under eerie lights of molten lava. Every punishment has an end, as every joy does, and any amount of time is inconsequential under the eye of true infinity. The various human acts, stripped down to its very insignificance.

How…slight we all are.

For him there never was a choice. There was never a grand epiphany, no persuasion from either side. He was forgotten, as time once had, and kindness always did.

When the great iron doors of his father’s palace opened for him as no door truly had, who was he to deny his allegiance to the man who’d saved his life a second time? And when he’d found out Percy was on this side as well, it had not even surprised him, it seemed as natural as the moon setting in the ocean.

Percy, who he…

No, Nico feels nothing. He works for his father and he works for Percy, and if he refuses to use the word love for either one of them, it’s because it’s not true.

Even now, as he sees Percy putting an arm around a blond slumped up figure, he feels nothing.

A little piece of rock falls from the ceiling.

Their hands intertwine.

A little crack appears in the golden floor.

How is she, he asks. Athena fell a short while ago. Annabeth’s eyes are closed, but she still manages a small moan of, fine, through her teeth.

What does it feel like, to have half of yourself die, to know that you’ve had a helping hand in the process? Will her intelligence deteriorate along with the goddess? He imagines having his powers extracted from him, to not feel skeletons under his feet, to not look at someone close to the end and have to bite his tongue. He thinks he might enjoy it, though he cannot understand the full implications any more than he can imagine living without an extra limb.

Percy turns towards him. He’s a bit pale, as Poseidon fell before Athena, weakened as he was by his own battle with Oceanus. But he’s still standing tall, and Nico is proud of his own work. Achilles’ curse holds true. It’s time, Percy says.

It’s all over, Annabeth says to Kronus. The Titans are vanquished. Only Hyperion stands, and he is not enough. We will destroy him. Treason, Kronus roars, and comes at them, overstepping the fissure where Ethan Nakamura fell, fighting for the gods. Was his eye worth anything? Nico still does not know.

Who do you fight for then, petty humans? The gods are dead. You have killed them. Which side are you on?

We fight for ourselves. We fight for destruction. Kronus screams. He looms over Annabeth, Backbiter raised above her head.

Family, Luke, you promised.

 

Luke dies.

You’ll go to Elysium, Annabeth whispers to him. Will he? He wonders. The judges are not so kind. And now he wonders if Elysium is even there at all.

He feels nothing as Luke’s eyes close for the last time. He feels nothing as Annabeth kisses Percy, right in front of him. Perhaps it’s because he’s already given the whole of his heart to a boy with sea-green eyes.

No, he does not think of it. He feels nothing.

* * *

Rachael understands.

She sees more than mortals, but she also sees more than the demigods, or perhaps the gods themselves, when they once lived. She calls it sight, but it’s more of a sudden blaze of understanding, the whole of her soul resonating in Eureka.

For split seconds she sees the Fates weave threads for a future, but she also sees that the future is something so much more complicated than her mind can process.

The Moirai weave and snip, hunched over a loom, the Norns water the roots of Yaggdrasil with the well of Urd, Sudičky spin their wheels next to a cradle, Enki creates a turtle and recovers the Tablet of Destinies, King Yama rides his buffalo, cuts the roots of life.

(They are all wrong, and they are all true.)

She understands quantum and possibilities, and random fluxuations in the universe that are not random at all. She sees chaos and cosmos, entropy and distorted mass. She sees worlds within worlds, worlds after worlds, dark spaces between them that are not really dark at all and are never meant to be seen.

She understands, and then, always, forgets. Cassandra was mute, and oh, how she relates. She cannot say what she knows. Cannot shape it into words, no language can fully encase it.

There is a final rumbling sound, almost like the echo of Typhon spiraling down to Tartarus, and Olympus falls. She greets the heroes as, covered in soot and dust. Luke is not among them.

(They are still heroes, their fatal flaws vanquished, their bravery still intact.)

Percy runs to join his mother and stepfather, and they hug.

(They hug the patricide out of their son. His sin flows in rivulets, burns with the brightness of their love.)

They stand around lost, for they’ve destroyed their own home. But no matter, the Romans arrive soon after. They come in rows of large black vans, as if they’re on a SWAT mission. She almost finds it funny. Almost.

The Greeks move like warriors, but the Romans move like soldiers. Both are surprised to find their work finished by the other. They speak of past animosities, but those causes are dead. There are only strings of common points that stretch between them. They are lost. They will find each other.

The gods took attributes from Rome as they moved, explains one of their leaders, a girl with dark eyes that flash in much the same way as Annabeth’s.

Then how could they have not seen it, she thinks. How could they have hoped to sustain superiority here, in the land of hopeless autonomy, of anti-kings? As Rome was mutually incompatible with the concept of lax gods, America is mutually incompatible with the concept of divine monarchy.

What happens now, asks another of their leader, a blond boy who stands with an easy authority in much the same way as Percy does.

Percy finds something funny in the question, and jokes about being anticlimactic. But they were once children of the gods, and without the gods, they cannot be children. Percy stands next to her, and when he laughs it is not a child’s laughter.

For some reason, they look to her. Quests and wars, things bigger than themselves have dictated their whole lives, and they are lost without them. What happens now?, they ask, and she sees…

(In another world, some die and some live. They are blessed and praised by the beings they call their parents. The lines around their mouth are less grim, and they get to be children for a little while more. She sends another children’s crusade to a meaningless war. Some die and some live. For some, she cannot tell which is better.)

(In another world, she receives a filter from the gods, and she can say a tiny part of what she sees, in arcane riddles, of course, so they do not know the true horror of knowing.)

She sees, and then forgets. She walks a tightrope between insanity and omniscience, and she chooses the easiest way so as not to fall.

I don’t know, she lies, as the world wakes up around them.

**Author's Note:**

> SO...for some of you who may be confused about what's going on, basically, the heroes join Kronus, the Titans and the gods clobber each other, and the heroes finish off whatever's remaining.


End file.
